


A Post on the Efficacy of Temporal Archaeology

by fresne



Category: Original Work
Genre: First Person, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-14
Updated: 2016-01-14
Packaged: 2018-05-13 21:02:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5716990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a sad truth of temporal archaeology that putting a historian directly in their field of study is doomed to failure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Post on the Efficacy of Temporal Archaeology

**Author's Note:**

> Came to me as I was driving home yesterday and insisted on being written. So here it is.
> 
> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.

It is a sad truth of temporal archaeology that putting a historian directly in their field of study is doomed to failure. 

Oh, certainly, proponents will tout the successes. 

Professor Paulo Adrianni's Etruscan tablet and notations on daily life in the city of Tarchna (1) has certainly advanced our understanding of the evolution of the alphabet and the roots of Roman civilization. That there were no tablets buried after his thirtieth birthday tells it's own tale.

Professor Xi Minn can wax poetic as often as he likes (2) about how his senior graduate student was able to seal a three hundred and four book cache in a wall against the book burning depredations of Emperor Qin Shi Huang (3), but he is careful not to mention how many graduate students were summarily jettisoned into the past before Mr. Nho Phan enjoyed his singular success. 

Put simply, we cannot continue to lob our graduate students into the distant past. Naked. Alone. With only their wits to rely on. For every student who was able to find a short life as a scribe or a brewer, there must be hundreds whose lives ended too soon(4). You have but to look at how few tenured professors choose to make the trip to know the cost.

There are those, I am sure, who will decry this post as mere sophistry. That I knew what I was in for when I accepted a temporal grant to complete my education. That I have a vital role in preserving Mixteca books due to be burned by the Conquistadors. That I will be able to make my mark on feminist history. I'm not sure how. But it's what was written on my going away card. I burned that card while drinking my last glass of Chianti. Actually, that's a lie. I have another bottle.

Actually, what's uppermost is either I'm going to make history, or my life will become the plot of "what this movie needs is a honkey", or… I'll be making the trek south to the Tawantinsuyu empire. See if Johanna or Pietre survived their own grad loans. But that's fine, it's my story, not histories. 

But that said, it really is true that putting a historian directly in their field of study is doomed to failure one way or another. 

1) I can even admit to being amused that the examples he chose to demonstrate the written language were the Etruscans heretofore unknown interest in speculative fiction.  
2) Who among us hasn't heard him discuss it at length at symposium.  
3) I am discounting the three doggerel poems composed by Mr. Nho Phan himself, which though amusingly rhymed pejoratives about Dr. Minn, do not count as classical works.  
4) There is of course the competing theory that those who don't leave evidence at their assigned cache sites were simply unable to resist the pull of changing history. Sending the past hurtling into some alternative dimension. A theory that ranks as pure pabulum, given it cannot be proved or disproved. i)

i) Unless the recent advances in alternative dimensional travel pay more fruit than strange inter dimensional apples(a).  
a) I had the pleasure of having blue spectrum inter dimensional apple pie. That is after we clubbed it into submission. Physicists make odd bakers.


End file.
